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New Zealand Mail, Issue 365, 8 February 1879, Page 4

* The Baron Dupopet de Sennevoy and Doctor Elliotson will doubtless be glad to be informed, that the inspired Scottish Poet was a believer in their magnetismal mysteries—at least in the article of reading a book behind the back. In a letter to Mr. Robert Ainslie, is the following passage in proof. "I have no doubt that scholarcraft may be caught, as a Scotchman catches the itch—by friction. How else can you account for it that born blockheads, by mere dint of handling books, grow so wi-e that even they themselves are equally convinced of and surprised at their own parts ? T once carried that philosophy to that degree, that in a knot of country folks, who had a library amongst them, and who, to the honor'of their good sense, made me factotum in the business ; one of our members, a little squat, upright, jabbering body of a tailor, I advised instead of turning over the leaves, to bind tlte book on his back. Johnnie took the hint, and as our meetings were every fourth Saturday, and Pricklouse having a good Scots mile to walk in coming, and of course another in returning. Bodkin was sure to lay his hand on some heavy quarto or ponderous folio ; wise and under which, wrapt up in a grey plaid, he grew wise as he grew weary all the way home. He carried this so far, that an old musty Hebrew Concordance, which we had in a present from a neighboring priest, by mere dint ofapplyingit as doctors do a blistering piaster, between his shoulders. Stitch, in a dozen pilgrimages, acquired as mnch rational theology as the saia priest had done by forty years' perusal of its pages."